Bike rides

Riis Beach

6 June 2026

It was Uma, Emily, and me. First we biked down the bumpy old Ocean Parkway bike path to Tashkent Supermarket, spent a hundred dollars at the hot bar: bags stuffed full of breads, potatoes, cherries, rice, chicken, seafood, broccoli, kimchi, sodas, kebabs, iced tea; and cameras, sunscreen, towels, bluetooth speaker, etc. We strapped it all on the bikes and rode another few miles to Riis Beach. It was bright and perfectly hot. We gorged ourselves on our hundred-dollar feast and played in the waves and napped. I read a Roberto Bolaño book out loud in Spanish but none of us were really understanding it. 





When the wind blew the clouds in from the sea we packed up and rode through the very american republican neighborhoods of the Rockaways, waited in line for the ferry with our bikes… from the deck of the ferry out in the middle of Jamaica Bay we could see that we were heading right into a ferocious storm. The wind whipped the rain so suddenly and so sharply into our skin it was kind of unbelievable…


Photo by Uma


We had to evacuate the top deck, standing soaked and shivering inside the air-conditioned boat. When we docked at Wall Street it was dark and still pouring rain. We got back on our bikes anyway—what else could we do?—and rode the last seven miles home in miserable, giddy disbelief. We stopped in the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge, in the middle of a summer-night storm, we were the only people there. I had to pee so badly so I just let it go all over the lonely trash can at the top of the bridge as the train rumbled by underneath. I didn’t even tell Uma this in the moment but at first I somehow pissed all over my leg, I felt the warmth trickle into my sock and shoe, but everything was already completely soaked and the rain just kept pouring down and rinsing everything, so fuck it. Getting home that night sopping wet, greasy and sunburned, calves dirty from the mud kicked up by the bikes…it was the best shower ever.